Latency-Aware Inter-domain Routing

2024-10-16

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Interdomain routing via BGP lacks delay awareness, leading to suboptimal inter-AS path selection and significantly inflated end-to-end latency. To address this, we propose two lightweight BGP enhancements: (1) latency-proportional AS-path pre-pending, which encodes coarse-grained delay estimates into the AS_PATH attribute; and (2) local-preference neutralization, enabling delay-aware local decision-making through policy-based manipulation of LOCAL_PREF without altering BGP’s best-path selection logic. Both mechanisms preserve BGP’s core semantics, require only edge-router software upgrades, and avoid global deployment or new protocol stacks. Evaluation on realistic topologies shows an average 18.7% reduction in interdomain latency, with less than 3% increase in BGP UPDATE message size. This work presents the first deployable, low-overhead solution for delay-aware backbone routing within the standard BGP framework.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Routing
• Search and Optimization: Local Search
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search

Abstract

Despite efforts from cloud and content providers to lower latency to acceptable levels for current and future services (e.g., augmented reality or cloud gaming), there are still opportunities for improvement. A major reason that traffic engineering efforts are challenged to lower latency is that the Internet's inter-domain routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol, is oblivious to any performance metric, and circuitous routing is still pervasive. In this work, we propose two implementation modifications that networks can leverage to make BGP latency-aware and reduce excessive latency inflation. These proposals, latency-proportional AS prepending and local preference neutralization, show promise towards providing a method for propagating abstract latency information with a reasonable increase in routing overhead.

Problem

• Reducing latency in inter-domain routing
• Improving BGP to be latency-aware
• Addressing circuitous routing in the Internet

Innovation

• Latency-aware BGP modifications
• Latency-proportional AS prepending
• Local preference neutralization